


Doghair

by wild_west_wind



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, F/F, Frontier Medicine, Gore, Guts - Freeform, Horror, Medicine, Monsters, Old West, Original Character(s), Romance, Spooky, Weather, Wild West, and some other messed up stuff, montana, seriously graphic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:35:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26426479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wild_west_wind/pseuds/wild_west_wind
Summary: In the 1860s, in the American frontier, folks came from all over to start a new life. Some were running from something, from someplace. A good many were running from themselves.In the rugged hills and mountains, they often found things they weren't expecting. Things they never could have expected. Things that kept them awake at night, their hearts beating fast and loud, thunderous as a locomotive. Some found their deaths, some found love sweet as honeysuckle in the golden light of sunset. Some found both. Some found something all together worse.A Note: Doghair forest refers to the young, dense, influx of lodgepole pines that grow rapidly to fill recently burnt forest. In time, the doghair forest gives way to a more mature forest, where weak, short seedlings die away, and spaces in the under-story widen.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	Doghair

There was electricity in Maura’s veins, clawing up from her bleeding left hand. Where she hoped a hand would still be when she liberated herself of her slops and furs. The beast had stopped fighting, but had nevertheless refused to die. It’s grey hair, streaked with red, frozen stiff and matted to its face. Its yellow eyes staring up, silent. Frozen blood, the beast’s and her own, froze to Maura’s face, to her apple red nose.

Maura grimaced, yanking hard on the rope that held the beast at bay. Her ruined left hand rested on her revolver. Two shots left after the fight. Her rifle, an old black powder monstrosity her father used in the war of 1812 was broken in twain four miles back through the dog hair forest _. It didn’t have to be like this. Why her of all of them_ , she thought. She spit. _Not her. It_.

* * *

An October storm was blowing in from the north. Two days past a rider out of Billings stumbled into a little cabin nestled low in the Gallatin Range. His fingers were white as snow. Moments later a little firebrand of a woman stormed in the door a whacked him across the ear with a rutabaga. Her name was June. Having wrought her frontier justice, she bade the man sit beside her hearth to warm up. The rider said the storm laid down three feet of snow overnight. Howling winds, he said, head of cattle frozen dead, still standing. June nodded, and listened along. She left him beside the fire, and walked to Maura’s and together the women cooked the rider a bowl of stew. June prepared some furs and quilts for him. Maura listened to his story, and tended to his wounds.

“You’ll be fine,” she told him, “Your fingers, maybe not, but the most of you will live to see home again.”

The young man smiled, and thanked the women for their hospitality.

He died that night. Not of cold, not of frostbitten fingers. Shot in the neck. That’s what Maura reckoned anyway. She had seen a fair number of folks killed as such back in Texas. Flesh torn from bone, arteries ripped and blood spewn. She wasn’t shy about what she saw. She didn’t often talk about it though, save late at night, deep in a bottle of whiskey. It was the blood that vexed her. Or rather the lack of it. Not a drop outside the cabin, not a drop within. June mentioned she saw no such wound on the man the night she laid him down with half her furs and quilts by the hearth, nor had she heard him leave overnight.

The two women retrieved a sheet from inside, one so threadbare it wouldn’t be missed, and placed it over the rider’s body. His skin was hard, not yet frozen, though frost crept up his fingertips and covered his eyes. He looked confused.

Maura rode to Bozeman that day. A hard ride with biting wind. There was a chill on the air, the sort that stings your throat and cracks your hands. The trail through Gallatin Canyon was narrow and sparsely used that time of year. Homesteaders and ranchers out in the mountains had all gathered their goods for winter. Cellars filled with dry beans and spring potatoes. Out buildings filled with smoked meat. Decisions made as to what stock would breed come springtime, and what would bleed into the soft white snow to feed their families.

Maura had settled down years before the town came, not that she was displeased by its arrival. June seemed frustrated, but in the end she didn’t complain much either. When Maura settled down in the mountains in ’58 she didn’t know June was nearby. No one seemed to know she was there, and yet she was, since at least ’51. No one seemed to know for sure.

June had many suitors in the fifties. She was a handsome woman indeed, one who refused to change her urban manner to befit the country life. She wore her dresses, every day, perfectly quaffed and pinned her long red hair. In the dead of winter she would march through the snow, through harsh wind at 30 below to deliver pastries, frozen solid of course, to Maura’s cabin. That first year Maura spent in the Gallatins would have been her last had it not been for June’s help.

Down in Bozeman folks were shuttering their stores, hammering boards over their windows to keep their meager heat in. It was awful early for a storm like this one. No one was ready. The late troubles did nothing to help in that regard.

Maura had not set foot in town in nearly 4 months, when she traveled to the barber to pull a broken tooth. For four months, and by some accounts for much longer, the town had been under siege. Folks were disappearing month by month. All with their throats torn open. All bled dry as desert soil.

It was travelers bound for Virginia City mostly, but a few folks from town as well. The last barber was found with his head torn clean off last November. The owner of a general store was identified after a month from the handmade moccasin found on his withered leg. The only scrap of him they could find.

Maura road to the carpenter’s shop and told him of the need for a coffin. She paid him a few bits up front for his trouble.

“Be safe out there Mrs. Maura,” He said as she tried to part ways, “The beast in the woods would just as soon take you, and I do fear that none would do you the courtesy you’re doing this fellow.”

Maura nodded, and rode without a word. She was not the sort to let such matters work themselves out. Not so close to home, not so close to the home of a person who had done so much for her, and asked so little. She was hunting tonight. Even if she did not know what she would find at the end of her musket.

She trudged out into the hills at sunset, just as the first flakes of snow were falling. The howling wind ripped over firs and whitebark that surrounded her homestead in the hills. Her goats stashed away inside, plenty of hay at their disposal. She did not bother to wash the dirt from her hands after gathering up the last of her vegetables.

The game trails out in the Gallatins grew slippery, first wet, then hard and slick with ice. In the distance an elk sang a mournful song. Maura smelled blood and piss on the wind. He wouldn’t survive the night, another victim of the lesser wants of his sex. Somewhere another male would stand shivering overnight, guarding the edge of his harem, his antlers bloody. She would remember where he fell. Should he be untouched by wolf or bear by dawn she would drag his frozen body home and eat well through winter.

The snow stopped without warning. The wind died. The sky above was black as tar, silent save the cracking and thumping of settling snow. Then a sound. A quiet brush against a branch. A gentle pressing against the snow. Maura tore a mitten off with her teeth and reached for her musket. Her skin screaming against the frozen trigger the instant she found it, burning in pain. She stood stock still, raising the musket to ready. The sounds, quiet though they were, drew closer. Maura’s heart pounded so loud in her ears she was shocked whatever lurked in the shadows could not hear it. Closer and closer it came, now shaking the bows right before Maura’s face. She could hear it taking in nearly silent breaths as she held her own. Maura fired the musket. A cacophonous roar over the silent snow, tearing needles from the pines and scaring birds from their frigid half sleep.

“Christ alive!” a woman shouted. Maura threw her musket down, tearing the skin from her trigger finger as she did.

“June?” She gasped, “What in God’s name are you doing out here in this mess?”

June stepped out of the trees, dressed impractically as ever in a comely dress of green wool, covered in a cloak made of heavy bison fur. Her cheeks were porcelain, her eyes shining as if lit by the sun. “I could ask you the very same question Maura. You’re much closer to my home than I to yours. I could well have been the one shooting at you.”

For such a little woman June had a fiery temper, something Maura found entirely too charming. “I’m off looking for something. That fellow that stayed with you last night, rest his soul, I fear something attacked him. I worried…

June smiled, “You worried for me?”

“Well I—“Maura’s face grew hot, “I figured whatever the foul thing that did such to that fellow could still be lurking round our woods. Seeing as it had not eaten him so much as left him drained. I can’t in good conscience let such an ungodly creature harass…the locals.”

June stood stock still, waiting for Maura to stop. There was too little light to read her face.

“I’ll admit,” Maura continued, “I did fear for your safety. Not that I don’t reckon you could handle such a foul thing on your own, I simply—“

“Stop,” June said, “I understand.”

“Do you mind then if I continue on my way?”

“I will come with you,” she stated, “Now let me see your hand.”

Maura had not noticed she was bleeding. The finest trickle of blood ran black from her index finger. June, without the slightest moment of pause, took Maura’s hand in her own. Maura squirmed, her hand, a working woman’s hand, a spiderweb of little scars, covered in callouses, cupped in hands that seemed all but untouched, by winter nor work. The soft hands a lady. Maura could agree she herself was a woman, but she was no lady, nor had she any desire to be one.

They stood in silence just long enough for June to brush the blood from Maura’s hand. The would was shallow, not worth a stitch nor a bandage. June released her neighbor’s hand, and smiled. Maura thanked her, and pulled her mitten back on.

They continued together is silence for some way. From the hills into the mountains proper. The deep mountains, where Bighorn Sheep would rut in the early days of summer, where two years before a fire had ripped through the land, burning a ranch and its three occupants alive. Burnt trees stood sentinel over young lodgepoles, their carbonized bark long since licked away by wapiti and sheep. June took Maura there the year before to collect morels. “Life follows death,” she mused as they walked along the blighted slope, “Often with little regard for death’s personal space.”

In the warm air of early summer, with patches of snow still clinging to the hillsides, Maura watched June scramble through the underbrush and smiled. Her day dress, a fine thing, caught time and again on the dead branches of the burnt trees, and she paid them no mind. Maura moved to her side, and joined her in picking mushrooms, making certain to leave some behind, to feed the animals Maura would hunt come autumn, and to drop spores and raise the next batch of mushrooms come the next thaw.

They roasted their treats that night with a haunch of bighorn and a few spring potatoes. Maura didn’t listen to June’s advice and took a slug of whiskey that upset her stomach so. June laughed and laughed. They spent that spring evening outside beneath the stars.

Maura didn’t often talk about Texas, about the War, but that night, tired though she was, she could hardly stop talking about it. About the men blown to smithereens by cannonballs, about the dying gasps of men on the battlefield, about the men she tried to save and couldn’t. About the men who looked her in the eyes, pleading for salvation, begging for help, or worse begging for death. About the men she had failed.

Maura remembered June taking her hand then too, and the pain, the memories, slipping away. She remembered June asking her to breathe. For the first time since she rode into Texas, she felt like that blasted place was far away.

Maura smiled in the snow. Her nose and cheeks numb. Cold creeping down her collar and up the edges of her coat.

“I hear something,” June whispered. Maura did not, but lost in thought as she was she did not once question June’s senses. Maura, being the only one of the two armed, set forward, pulling her musket to her hands. Then, the world became, for an instant, bright. Not lit by any light, but by the blinding force of a swift blow to the back of her head.

The pain shot through her skull, screaming across her ringing ears, pressing down her spine. Another blow caught her across the right side, and threw her off balance. Still unable to see, sparks shooting across her blurred vision, Maura shook loose her left mitten and fired the musket wild. It hit something, something soft, but she neither heard the being fall, nor falter, nor cry out in pain. Instead she felt something grabbing at her free hand. She felt a tug on her fingers, stretching them further than should have been possible. She felt her body pull across the fresh fallen snow and the dry burnt sticks below. She felt her body smash against a tree, the joints of her hand popped and cracked, and suddenly her fingers, already numb, felt like nothing at all. She did not dare to look, instead reaching under her coat for her revolver. The heft of the thing in her right hand held her down. She stood and held it aloft, level across her eyeline.

“June?” she tried to whisper, but though ragged breaths it came as a yelp, “June where are you, are you okay?”

Yellow eyes glint out of the dense lodgepole forest, “You shot me,” it says, incredulous, “I should not have expected less.”

“What are you and what did you do with June?” Maura spat. She leveled the revolver at the glowing eyes and squeezed the trigger. A calamitous shout spilled out into the dead air of night. A flash of light caught the creature in profile. A mane of hair, greasy, waxy, bright white skin emerging from a heavy coat of fur, all streaked with blood red. Maura saw splinters fly out of a distant tree. She missed.

The creature did not reply. It flew over the snow, silent and fast as an owl to its prey, only the slightest sloppy step making the faintest noise. Silence fell again, allowing Maura a moment for a single breath, shallow and painful though it was. A twig cracked, and she spun around, leveling her revolver toward a glowing set of yellow eyes.

Maura squeezed off another round. Another strike of thunder fell through the burnt forest. In another flash she saw the creature turn, its eyes glowing like stars in the sky. She heard blood fall thick upon the snow. She heard bones snapping, held together loosely and now grinding as the creature moved forward. There was no cry. Not in the creature’s voice, not in any voice. Just silence.

A shallow gust of wind pulled over the wood. Young trees, nipping at the heels of their long dead parents swayed gently. A flurry of snow fell, dusting all with the faintest layer of powder. Maura could hear the drip drip drip of blood from her left hand, slowing now as her saturated mitten began to freeze.

Maura pulled back the hammer of her revolver, and waited. The beast was silent, wounded, but now focused. It would not make itself heard again. It was not playing now, as a fat housecat would with a mouse. It was fighting for its life.

In the quiet, the clouds thinned just enough to see a silhouette of the moon. The jagged edges of mountains stood sentinel over the valley below, over two cabins in the woods. Two cabins Maura feared would not see their keepers home. When the moon finally did crest the shadows, the beast had already attacked.

Two yellow eyes, monstrous flaming topaz, opened mere inches from Maura’s side. She turned, and could not hear herself scream past the thunder in her head. A mouth lined with two rows of razor teeth opened, falling loose and reaching out as one would reach for a suitor’s hand, lunged for Maura’s throat, and without hesitation or thought, the mountain woman raised her revolver to the thing’s throat and fired.

In the light of the gunshot Maura saw her attacker’s face is excruciating detail. She saw its huge yellow eyes, cut by slits like the eyes of a cat. She saw its jagged teeth, lit like a jack o’ lantern, from the inside, as the revolver’s blast tore through its chin. She saw its delicate clawed fingers, and its bare feet porcelain white on the snow. She saw its green woolen dress, its whalebone corset broken and torn. She watched its bison fur cloak fall away, its perfectly quaffed and pinned hair throw loose as a bullet passes through its head.

Maura, closed her eyes, she felt fire in her heart, and in her gut. She felt her intestines rending and ripping inside of her. The roar of blood behind her eyes like a waterfall in spring, still carrying hunks of ice loosed from the distant river banks, smashing hard against the valley floor. A beast lay in front of her, still moving, still breathing in shallow little gasps for life. Instinct alone called on her to tie the thing up.

Maura wrapped a hempen rope around the beast’s arms and legs, yanking the rope tight as she could, until the flesh below blossomed red. Then, she looped it across the creature’s neck. Her right hand lingered over the creature’s face. Her, its, yellow eyes followed every movement. Already the wound at its throat, the killing blow it had seemed, was knitting shut. The same must be true of the matching crater atop its head, and the gunshot would across its belly as well, though Maura did not care to check. Now the creature, save its eyes, looks again like June. Like her June.

Maura thought herself a fool, frozen in the burn scars of the Gallatins, pushing her way through the bright new growth that would one day stand as tall and hard as the forest that birthed it, and would one day, long after Maura and all her kith and kin were returned to the soil, burn again. She wrapped the rope around her good forearm, and with a jerk began to drag the thing across the frozen ground.

June, the creature, was battered by the trip. New cuts tore open and healed constantly across her face and side. Her dress ripped and shearing off her shoulder. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and black tar poured out. Then a cough. No words, but more than Maura had hoped to hear. She had heard her gasp before; she had heard June nearly choke on a bit of buckshot lost in the body of a grouse late last summer. The sound sent shivers down her spine then. Doubly now. They trudged on.

The snow ebbed and flowed as the night hours passed. Maura knew the Gallatins well enough to guide herself through unscathed. She looked at her boot prints, where they had not been buried already in the snow. Where she could pick up her own trail she found only one set of prints heading to the woods.

“I’m—“ the beast choked on its own words, its own blood and the rope around its neck, “I’m sorry about your hand.”

Maura stayed silent.

“I admit I figured that when I first laid my lips on you it would be under different circumstances.”

Maura stopped.

“Maura you know me. You know I would never want to hurt you. Let me go and I can explain.”

“When did I give you the impression I was going to let you go?”

June’s bestial eyes flashed like wildfire on a distant hill, “You’ve shot me. You blew my brains out. Here I am, still talking. Who says you have a choice?”

Maura drew her revolver, trading it over to her intact hand, “I’ve seen enough folk killed to know there’s a bullet for all of us. I reckon I’ve got yours, I just need to find it.” Maura bit her lip. Tears were welling in her eyes, frigid drops of ice.

The creature was steely. She bared her teeth, but did not speak. She stared up at her captor, and neve broke her gaze.

There was smoke rising in the distance, June’s cabin. Maura pulled her captive onward. She worried a bullet would not be enough. She that the alternatives she has would be so much worse. She worried she was awake and would have to sleep with the fact that she killed a creature as kind as June had been to her. She wondered how she could live with herself knowing she owed her life to a murderer. A monster. She wondered when the creature took her June, or if June had been the creature all along.

June had been kind enough to leave a fire in her hearth, just enough to stave off the chill. It’s all for show, Maura suspected, to appear that she’s home as she stalks her prey. She had a deathly pallor about her. Streaks of rouge and blood and tar ran down her face and neck, staining her chemise.

“You’re not going to kill me,” She stated. She knew. Maura glared down, saying nothing. June was not gloating. She did not smile, with human teeth nor the horrid shark’s teeth she hid within her gums.

Maura threw a log on the fire, and sat in June’s chair. She waited for a long moment, saying nothing. She looked at her hand, and saw it mangled. Two fingers white and lifeless. The three that remained were beet red, waxy. She’d be luck to save those. She’d be lucky if she didn’t lose the whole arm. She pulled a flask out of her coat, and took two generous glugs. One for her, one for her hand. It burnt her throat, but not her hand.

Then, through the silence, without prompt, June answered the question that had plagued Maura’s mind since the burn scar up in the mountains.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to,” June squirmed, “Something’s just-- I’m different. I’ve tried to change, nothing works. I hope you know I’ve prayed to God, I’ve prayed to every God I could find, I’ve kneeled at every altar, taken every medicine, tried every alternative. This is just… It’s what I am.”

Maura signed, “I wish I could believe that June.”

“It’s worse before the first big snow. I don’t know why. It always has been, since I was a girl.”

“Why?”

“I don’t fucking know Maura. I wish I did, maybe I could fix it if I did. Maybe I could finally end this whole thing. I was born like this, my Pa was normal. Ma was… Well she was different but not so much so.”

Maura said nothing. She stared into the fire, beyond the fire.

“When folk know they try to kill me. I always live, but sometimes they do worse than try to kill me too.”

“I believe you.”

“I spent two years thrown in a well before I came out here.”

“For Christ’s sake, I believe you June.”

June lay silent.

“Does eating animals help? Can you stave it off like that?”

June nodded, “I can, but I can’t get enough, fresh enough, to stave it off. When it gets to be too much I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s like I’m underwater, watching things unfold through something else’s eyes. I remember it all. Maura I remember ever face, ever scream. Some nights I can’t sleep they’re screaming so loud,” tears streamed down June’s face, her eyes, not monster’s eyes now, but the soft brown eyes of a doe, “Maura I didn’t want to hurt you. I knew you wouldn’t leave me if I didn’t...I wanted you to kill me. I hoped this would be the time it worked. I’m so sorry Maura, I shouldn’t have put that on you, I never deserved you. I never deserved to have someone like you in my life.”

Maura looked down at June. Her June. Soft and small and wretched and cold. She saw her, and she saw men dying in tent in the battlefield. She saw men who weren’t hurt in the slightest, blood staining their blues, not a drop of which spilled from their own bodies. She saw their eyes, cold and distant. She didn’t love them, but she felt for them. June though…

Maura reached down, and with her intact hand pulled loose the knot around June’s hands. The woman sat up, still crying, still begging forgiveness, still begging for death. Her wet hair, screaked with grey, matted to her bare shoulder.

Maura stood over her, and closed her eyes for a long moment, and left without a word. Maura let the door swing shut behind her. June did not rise to latch it. Flurries of snow blew in, and the creature lay on the hard, wooden floor of her cabin. Silence cut only by the howls of wind, and the howls of sorrow, and the howls of wolves on distant hillsides.

The next day, at sunrise, the carcass of an elk lay on her doorstep.


End file.
